Jesu is back with another mammoth slab of religious iconography, loathing, and detuned metal chords played deadly slow. If Loveless wasn't already taken, that might be a more fitting title for this record of empty-hearted love songs.
Ascension begins with "Fools," a song which lays out the Jesu philosophy clearly enough. A mournful acoustic guitar, rhythm loop, and hushed lyrics about "fools," "heaven," and "hope" give way to a deep wall of metal riffing slowed down to quarter time. The words and chords repeat and then grind on for another five minutes until Justin Broadrick's voice, drowned out by dissonant guitars, stretches to sing "You'll be there at my end." The song is humorless and cynical but it seems to be coming from a romantic place, as if Broadrick desperately wants to write love songs but has nothing worth pulling from to make them sweet.
Other songs like "Broken Home" and "Black Lies" support the notion that Ascension is going nowhere fun, fast. The album rings out with bitterness but it's not the kind of bleak, nihilism that might be expected given Broadrick's dark and unforgiving history with Godflesh. Instead, Ascension feels tragic, as if birthed from someone who wants love and faith to brighten the day, but can not believe that things will work out in the end.
"Broken Home" is my favorite song on the record and it may be the best example of what Jesu does so very well. The song is intensely personal, made almost painfully honest with a dry and cracking vocal that sits atop slow metal riffing and a drum beat that sounds as if it's going to fall apart at any moment. Like many of the songs on Ascension, it is notably pretty but also quite broken and sad.
Broadrick makes one misstep here with the sped-up "Sedation," a song that almost sounds like a mid 1990s college radio number. It plays to his worst inclination to sing sincerely but outside of his range, and the upbeat tempo simply breaks the album's otherwise steady flow in a jarring way. Once that bump is over though, the album lurches forward through "Brave New World," "December," and "King of Kings"—all songs that stick firmly to the formula laid out in "Fools," and provide more evidence that Jesu is one of the most consistent acts in recent times.
Beneath the walls of slow-burning guitar and crash cymbals and the dreadful heartache that turns nearly every song into a lament, Ascension seems like it is trying to be a hopeful record. I'm not sure that Broadrick believes that his stories can have happy endings, but this seems to be what hope sounds like when it pushes itself out of continual ugliness.
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